[Mimedefang] Mimedefang errors: What might be the cause?

[Gary Funck]

> From: Lisa Casey
> Sent: Saturday, January 14, 2006 8:16 AM
>
> I'm running Mimedefang/Spamassassin on a Redhat server with Sendmail.

Which versions?

What sort of hardware (cpu type, speed, memory size)

How many average messages/day?

> This
> has all been running fine for a couple of years now. Suddenly,
> this morning
> my customers were unable to send  e-mail. Looking at
> /var/log/maillog, I saw
> lots of entries such as this:
>
> Jan 14 02:22:18 Raydeus-Dee mimedefang-multiplexor[1014]: No free slaves
> Jan 14 02:22:18 Raydeus-Dee mimedefang-multiplexor[1014]: No free slaves


Unless you have a very active night shift, 2AM is not a typical time
to expect a mail overload.

Couple of things to check:

1. disk space: try 'df -h' and note if any file systems are full or near
full.
   Especially the one that /tmp lives on.
2. check your version of SA.  Versions 3.0.0 through 3.0.3 are subject to
   Denial of Service attacks.
3. Try running, 'md-mx-ctrl rawstatus', and check 'man md-mx-ctrl' for
   an explanation of the results.  With some work, you could write a cron
   script that tails /var/log/maillog and looks for the 'no free slaves'
   and have it run some combination of 'top -b | head -20',
   'md-mx-ctrl rawstatus' and any other commands that can give you some
   info. on what might be going on.